Yesterday, two Promus Ventures portfolio companies (Rocket Lab and Spire) announced they were going public via SPAC (double the fun!). Yesterday we wrote about Rocket Lab’s $4.1B enterprise valuation announcement and today we get the privilege of trumpeting Spire and its plans to go public at a $1.2B enterprise valuation.
There are few teams that we have worked with that have globally scaled at an early stage as seamlessly as Spire. Peter Platzer and team founded the Company in 2012 in San Francisco, and soon thereafter opened up their satellite manufacturing plant in Glasgow, followed by adding offices in Boulder, Singapore, Washington DC, and finally Luxembourg.
Time zones? What time zones? The Spire team never sleeps and is well deserving of its newly publicly announced merger with special purpose acquisition company NavSight Holdings [NYSE: “NSH”]. The transaction is scheduled to close during Q2 2021, and will provide approximately $408M of cash for Spire (net of fees), which includes approximately $230M of cash held in NavSight’s trust account as well as approximately $245M in PIPE commitments from including Tiger Global, BlackRock, Hedosophia and others.
Spire forecasts that it will generate EBITDA in 2022, positive free cash flow in 2023 and more than $1.2B ARR in 2025. After closing, Spire will be publicly listed on the Nasdaq under the ticker “SPIR.”
Spire was an early pioneer in the “Space-as-a-Service” model, and has spent the last nine years building its proprietary, space-based data and analytics platform. We wrote about Promus Ventures joining the board and leading Spire’s $40M Series B round way back in June, 2015. We remember the days of everyone on the board helping the team call suppliers directly to try to help get needed parts over the line. It was not long until everyone realized Peter and team needed to just build the entire stack themselves. Although painful (and expensive!) to execute this model over many years, all this work has paid off today as Spire enjoys a large moat having launched over 140+ of its own LEMUR nanosatellites giving the Company 100% earth coverage.
Spire processes approximately 5 terabytes of data each day for its over 150 product customers in more than 30 countries. It has a highly technical workforce of over 250 employees, including approximately 140 engineers and scientists. The Company’s platform sells across maritime, aviation, weather and orbital services with strong operating leverage driven by Spire’s “collect once, sell many times” model.
Since our initial investment in Spire back in 2014, it has been a privilege to partner for many years with Peter and team, and watch them lead in the early days of building the future of data analytics from space. Today Spire is truly a high-growth SaaS business operating in a massive total addressable market.
It will be fun to watch Spire soon as a public company continue to forge ahead and execute on their extraordinary vision well into the future!
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